A cable modem (CM) provides access to a signal sent over a cable television (CATV) system. The signal may be associated with a network (e.g., the Internet) to which the CATV provides access. The signal may be, for example, an electrical signal, an optical signal, an analog signal, a digital signal, data, and so on. A cable modem may need to acquire an Internet Protocol (IP) address to access the network. DHCP servers provide IP addresses. Therefore, a CM may send a DHCP request to a DHCP server and a DHCP server may send a reply to a CM requesting an IP address. These DHCP requests and replies may traverse a cable modem termination system (CMTS) associated with the CATV. While a cable modem may communicate with a single CMTS, the CMTS may communicate with a large set (e.g., thousands, tens of thousands) of modems. Additionally, the CMTS may communicate with a set of DHCP servers involved in initializing modems. Thus, a CMTS and/or a DHCP server may produce a choke point associated with processing DHCP requests from modems. This choke point may produce delays in the modem registration process.
Before a cable modem can communicate through a CMTS, the cable modem may need to initialize and register with the CMTS. Initialization and registration may involve progressing the cable modem through states including channel scanning, contention ranging, secondary ranging, DHCP, and so on. These states and communications between the cable modem and the CMTS associated with these states may conform to a data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS (e.g., DOCSIS 3.0, August 2006)). Conventionally, initialization and registration of a set of cable modems in accordance with the DOCSIS may produce a bottleneck in the CMTS. The bottleneck may be related to a mismatch in the rate at which a CMTS can bring cable modems to the DHCP state and the rate at which a CMTS and/or DHCP server can process DHCP requests to advance a cable modem past the DHCP state. In some cases, an additional bottleneck may occur in a CMTS and/or DHCP server when a DHCP request arrival rate exceeds a DHCP request processing rate. The bottleneck(s) may limit the rate at which cable modems are registered and brought online. The bottleneck(s) may affect all cable modems equally, even though it may be desirable to have some cable modems registered before other cable modems. For example, some cable modems may be associated with high priority entities (e.g., 911 service, high rate subscriber) while other cable modems may be associated with low priority entities (e.g., advertising kiosk, low rate subscriber).